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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> Anecdote: a family member and software dev just bought the latest macbook pro coming from about an 8 year old macbook pro. Apparently he doesn't perceive much real world performance difference between the 2 machines. He said single core synthetic benchmarks were higher, but not by much.

It really depends on the workload. My old MacBook Pro feels the same as the newer model 98% of the time that I'm using it, but I really appreciate the extra RAM and double the core count when I need it.

Reducing build times from 30 seconds down to 15 seconds doesn't sound like much when you're not pressing the compile button very often, but it really does help improve my engagement and focus.

The newer graphics cards are also much better at handling large and high-resolution external monitors. The difference isn't pronounced if you're just using the built-in laptop screen, but start using multiple external 4K+ monitors and the faster GPU starts to shine.

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Also anecdotally, I'd say the only things that would make a clearly noticeable performance difference to a layperson or casual computer user from the last few years would be:

1. If they previously had less than 4GB of memory and were often swapping

2. If they previously had a spinning HDD and moved to an SSD

3. If they previously had a really low end CPU like something outside the Core range, and moved to an i5 or better

Beyond that, all the other stuff is either a marginal performance gain or a convenience feature. The only other "must have" thing from the last few years that I wouldn't want to lose is a high res monitor, but that falls into the convenience category for me and not performance.

Power users like your family member got quantifiable benefit from performance upgrades over the years, but if they were already running decent hardware like a Macbook Pro, they didn't get any life altering upgrades. Taking 15 seconds to compile vs 30 is definitely faster, but you still have to sit and wait each time you push the button, so any habits that you learned from the 30 second pause will probably continue.

In my opinion the jump from 1080p to 4K is as significant as the jump from hdd to ssd. That's a lot of screen real estate and especially when programming I put it to use.

I disagree. The bottleneck is usually your eyes, not the monitor. On 1080p you can use small bitmap fonts that are legible even at low resolutions. 4K mostly gives you more flexible typography aesthetics, which doesn't improve programming productivity.

1080p outright looks blurry after using 4k, so its pretty hard to even contemplate going back

The whole point of bitmap fonts is that they're designed to be used without anti-aliasing. There's no blur.

Examples:

https://github.com/Tecate/bitmap-fonts

If you're on 4K you can simulate how they look on 1080p with 2x integer nearest neighbor scaling.

Too bad I can't bitmap-font UI elements. Being able to scale those freely (my DE allows it by a float value that is currently around 1,65) without too noticeable blur is my most important reason for a high resolution screen.

The by current standards normal sharpness is nice too (1080 screens aren't really blurry, they're pixely).

But getting vscode or chrome to render fast at 4k is nontrivial.

I basically went back to 1080p because of this.

2k equivalent on a 4k screen feels very good on my eyes. Reducing fatigue is productivity.

> The bottleneck is usually your eyes

Eye resolution is ridiculously high. There's a reason companies started marketing 'retina' displays.

Small fonts will not always fall into discrete pixels which is especially true if the resolution is not very high. Which requires you to do antialiasing or mangle the characters.

Higher resolution displays allows you to render them more faithfully.

1440p 27” is the sweet spot for me: no scaling needed while not having to have your face inside your display and neck doesn’t hurt from constant twisting.

4. If they previously had a 60Hz monitor, and upgraded to 120Hz or better.

This improves both motion quality and latency. When poorly designed software makes you wait multiple frames, halving (or better) the frame time makes a noticeable difference.

I find this one hard to swallow. On 60Hz software is already the bottleneck even on high end hardware. If anything, it’ll drive a perfectionist mad because crappy software that the high end hardware allowed to operate just over that threshold (say 64Hz) would suddenly be exposed.

I think jitter is more important than FPS and until software has caught up (likely never) I would rather cap the frame rate at 60 FPS and experience that somewhat consistently rather than have such disparate performances.

It’s the same thing with retina/HiDPI. It’s amazing when everything is retina, but all the random bits and pieces of UI, let alone entire softwares, that appear blurry make for a worse experience than a strictly low dpi UX.

120Hz is incredible for gaming. Unity and Unreal Engine dynamically scale tessellation and many other things to accommodate hardware performance, so as to maintain FPS on high-refresh screens. The polygon counts, texture detail, AI complexity of modern games is bonkers, but multiple moon landings of engineering time has gone into keeping solid 100Hz+ frame rates.

However, you are definitely correct when it comes to GUI productivity applications. Drawing text in boxes is apparently much harder than rendering an immersive world in real time. The implications are too disturbing to consider, so I do not.

Some of it is deliberate:

https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543

It's another harmful effect of mobile-first design. A trivial power saving gives measurably improved battery life, but the horrible latency is ignored.

> 120Hz is incredible for gaming.

...if you're playing with v-sync :-P. I got a (rather expensive too) 165Hz monitor recently and the main benefit is to lessen the lag that Windows' forced composition (which also does v-sync) has. But in games i always played with v-sync turned off (i do not mind the tearing, unless it only happens at a fixed position i never really notice it) and the responsiveness was already very high. And on Linux and older versions of Windows where i could disable the compositor, i already had high responsiveness on the GUI too (if anything i feel like even with the 165Hz monitor, the Windows 10 desktop is still not as responsive as Windows 7 and previous versions of Windows were with the compositor disabled).

Though a large issue with that is how modern monitors work. I also have a CRT connected to an older computer here which can do 120Hz and the motion feel is considerably better to the point where i wonder what the hell was wrong with people in the mid-2000s to switch away from CRTs when in pretty much every other area except size and weight, the CRTs were superior - especially at the time (better image quality, better and true dark colors, better responsiveness/no 'response time', higher refresh rates, higher resolutions, variable resolutions with no scaling artifacts, etc). In fact a reason i decided to try a 165Hz monitor was because i recently connected that CRT to a machine that can do 120Hz and have some games to run at 120fps and wanted that experience for my main PC too.

(sadly i do have a feeling that if i hadn't used a CRT the last few years i'd be more enthusiastic about my new monitor since i do not think the currently technology can do much better - at least without going to something like that gigantic $3k OLED monitor though even that would annoy me for its size)

The size and weight of CRTs was basically unbearable. Huge problems. You can give up a lot to get out from that, and most CRTs weren't that sort of high quality. Most of us lost nothing but a huge inconvenience when we moved from CRT to LCD/TFT/whatever.

But it isn't like you'd get your CRT out for a walk or anything, you'd buy a monitor and leave it at your desk for months - often years - so that weight wasn't much of an issue unless you moved around all the time.

> if you're playing with v-sync

High refresh rate monitors tend to support freesync or Gsync. For minimum latency disable vsync, enable free / gsync. Only enable vsync if your fps is above the monitors refresh rate. Alternatively you can enable a framerate limit just below the refresh rate.

My monitor supports Freesync but after testing with some games i found vsync off to have the minimum latency. Which is expected, since it always has the minimum latency even with 60Hz monitors, but i decided to try it anyway because i've seen very conflicting reports out there. The neat thing with the monitor is that i can switch it on and off while the game is running (there is an OSD option) but so far i haven't found any game where it is better.

Every now and again I think a "Windowing/Compositing" desktop experience replacement in the form of an Unreal Engine based "game" would be cool.

Even supports VR. '80s Cyberpunk matrix here I come!

pulls out a virtual gun to kill a process dead

Have you seen psdoom?

No I had not! It seems like what I was thinking.

Take the same idea and put it into Unreal Engine. Add further OS interactions like files, maybe a floating virtual window for web browsing etc.

The UX has to be done very well though otherwise you are a prediction by TV show Community:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ&ab

> It’s the same thing with retina/HiDPI. It’s amazing when everything is retina, but all the random bits and pieces of UI, let alone entire softwares, that appear blurry make for a worse experience than a strictly low dpi UX.

The very, very first thing I did at my last company after migrating to a retina Macbook Pro was go into our monitoring systems and configure it to render the graphs at 2x size and then scale them down on the client.

That used to be the default circa 2013 and the original rMBP. IIRC they only ~recently changed that, and I believe it was because the hardware had stagnated to the point where the GPU couldn’t keep up.

No, he really is right.

A lot of software, especially websites, have annoying waits for Vsync that are not needed in them.

When you update styles that triggers a reflow or repaint, then you can introduce a wait for VSync in your website thats stalls flow until it is finished.

If you add 3 frames of delay at 60fps then it's 50ms of delay, and only 25ms at 120fps. It doesn't sound like a lot, but that 25ms can be the difference between feeling totally fluid and not, and a lot of websites are even worse than that.

Software can be IO bound, Network bound, CPU bound, memory bound.

Modern software is Vsync bound!

Can't confirm that. Used 144 Hz display and was not really able to tell a difference. I run benchmark and there were very subtle difference, but 60 hz is more than enough for me. Now 4K resolution is a big deal.

You must be immune to the "soap opera effect" on the newer TVs as well.

I am not (it actually really really bothers me to the point of making TV unwatchable) and I can't for the life of me notice the difference between 120hz and 60hz between my work and home monitors.

Yes, he said the only thing he really noticed is that his build time dropped by a double digit percent but not a triple digit percent. He'd bought top of the line specs each time and had maxed out the ram and processor bin.

I wonder what a triple digit percent drop would feel like...

I think it feels like traveling back in time :)

Does this new Intel chip have that?! Wow! ;-)

Time loop logic? I guess that would just about make it into the triple digits :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_princ...

And now there's a new category.

4. If they previously had an early generation of Core CPU like a Sandy Bridge that suffered great performance hit due to vulnerability, and then moved to an Ice Lake, or better, an AMD...

This is big factor for performance degradation, especially prior Ivy Bridge era.

> If they previously had less than 4GB of memory and were often swapping

These days, it's more like if they previously had less than 12 GB of memory and were often swapping. Having a few dozen tabs open isn't that uncommon and interactive websites (Twitter, Gmail, Google Docs) can use an enormous amount of RAM.

Having a few dozen tabs open is actually incredibly weird outside of this little world.

I have met a number of people who use tabs in lieu of bookmarks.

I just switched from a laptop with spinning rust and an Intel Celeron N2830 to a laptop with an SSD and a Ryzen 5 4500U. Each of the six cores is several times more powerful than the old CPU. Now I get why so many developers build sites that were unusable on the old one. Even a JavaScript-heavy site is as performant as a static site now. They don't even realize what they're doing to people stuck on old low-end computers.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-N2830-vs-...

A few years ago I accidentally left my laptop at work, and couldn't program over a long weekend. I had a first generation raspberry pi kicking around so I pulled that out, hooked it up to my monitor, installed nodejs and git and got to work from there.

It took 700ms or so for my server process to even start on a r.pi - I'd noticed a brief delay on my laptop, but it was so awful on the pi that I ended up spending the whole weekend profiling and optimizing. Anyway, come Monday I pulled the changes onto my fancy laptop and they made a noticable difference in subtle responsiveness. Everything just felt faster. I probably wouldn't have even noticed if I didn't spend that time programming on the pi.

Facebook has "slow internet thursdays" or something, where once a week developers can opt in to experience their internal facebook dev environments in the same way it feels for people on slow connections in poorer countries. I think that sort of thing would be good for all of us. Programming in constrained environments makes our software work better everywhere.

In Chrome (and I'm guessing other browsers) you can go into the network tab and slow down networking. I don't think there is a similar option for CPU perf.

There are several race conditions in many webpages related to waiting for video or images to load.

Tangentially my late 2018 i5 MBA feels sluggish compared to my 2014 MBP. Simple things like switching windows are noticeably slower and janky. Unfortunately my 2014 MBP has an no longer supported NVidia GPU by Chrome/Firefox/Photoshop so I may have to upgrade but I know it will basically feel no different than what I have except I'll have the touch bar which I'm not really interested in.

It's kinda limited though. Like it doesn't affect websocket and webrtc traffic.

file a bug

> I don't think there is a similar option for CPU perf.

I believe there is an option in the Performance pane to throttle the CPU in Chrome.

> ended up spending the whole weekend profiling and optimizing

Some games supposedly have been optimised similarly by running parts of it on a C64 or Amiga. I cant recall the game or studio but John Carmack comes to mind.

> but start using multiple external 4K+ monitors and the faster GPU starts to shine

And heat up, unfortunately.

I'm completely fine with it getting loud and toasty when I push it, but the 5300M and 5500M in the 16" MacBook Pro ramp their memory clocks up to max as soon as two displays are on, even when idling. This results in a constant ~20W power draw that destroys the battery life, has the fans constantly audible, and makes the top case above the keyboard uncomfortably hot.

Apparently similar issues in desktop AMD cards have been addressed via driver updates, but considering whoever is responsible for updating Mac GPU drivers never actually does it, I'm not holding my breath.

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